Pacifica: Disney's Obsession With Redeeming Rich Girls

this video is sponsored by private internet access vpn i did it um can i pay you to pretend that never happened [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i swear y'all are way too easy to impress welcome go to hell i got strep throat so forgive me for not flexing my usual warm sincere attitude as a story about a boy everyone wanted to move the fuck on and disney's brain rod obsession with redeeming rich girls is both great and not nearly as good as everyone thinks it is they had one episode together and suddenly everyone wants to make this end game his bitch got trauma which is pretty much all you need to redeem a character anymore and i love it so seeing us there really isn't that much to say about these two and how they don't get together i'm gonna be talking a little bit more about just the trend disney has become obsessed with but after sasha amny and andrea it's become pretty clear that they got a type and like everything post 2010 it's zuko's fault but if we're talking about fault you have 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you ship them together but i am going to imply it heavily literally one episode was all it took and y'all propped these two up like they were the second coming don't try deny it i was there holding them up too because i am easy for as much as i harp on about what is and isn't right based on popular demand i really can't forgive just about anything if there's enough trauma in it so when gravity falls so i'd take his resident mean girl and give her a shitty home life i was already on board phone off and ready to watch sparks fly but going back to watch the cartoon equivalent of a one night stand really got me thinking i've seen this before like a lot and it always works for me so with that in mind i just want to skim through dipper and pacifica to just kind of talk about how besika really fits into this bigger trend we're seeing don't worry i'll do a quickie at the end but if i'm being honest this ship is just okay and i just kind of need something extra to talk about so i can actually finish this video so let's talk about it by going over the original mean girl of the 2010s honestly who's gonna compete against me sport girl lizard lady pacifica is one of those examples where it just goes to show you don't have to make a character likeable to be popular girl literally just showed up acted entitled and won which is the kind of energy we respect in media but hate in real life first appearing at a party where her first instinct is to just demand a party crown for a contest that hadn't even started this first impression is as stock bad girl as you can get with not a single redeemable quality about her as she spends her whole night being mean talking down to atypicals then bribing her way to victory when being pretty wasn't enough there isn't a damn thing about her that should get her the cult of personality that she ended up with but here's the thing it works as pacifica really taps into that ancient tradition of mean girls who you hate but love to watch it's just that right combination of ego saying things you wish you could say and that sadistic joy of watching other people get torn down that we just can't naturally gravitate towards these aren't people we want to be friends with but they are characters that a small part of ourselves kind of wish we were with the best thing about them being is that you are just begging for them to get taken down a pig because yes congrats on being a puffed up ball of hot air now it's time for payback daniel northwest didn't found gravity falls and your whole family is a sham deal with it what mom revenge is underrated that felt awesome it's just so cathartic seeing bad people we hate get their just desserts great every single time it happens attending group owl group mentality that we have just makes us want to see people we like have good things happen to them while everyone else deserves nothing but the worst and the fact that they actually deserve it lets us pretend we're not sadists with the pacifica's humbling moments come from various incidents where the twins go out of their way to ruin her day such as when they proved her ancestor didn't build gravity falls was in fact the village idiot lean to all of her grandstanding and belittling to fall apart as she realizes she's descended from shit people so suck it it's a petty thing to do but it's so funny to watch in this cycle this cliche was one of the favorite punching bags of the early 2000s but even then there's a growing interest in them as characters as people finally start to ask the question what if we start treating mean girls like people is yes it's fun to watch bad things happen to bad people none of the previous works really gave them any depth outside of their assigned role in the story never try explore the question of why is she so mean and that twist really just started adding all this extra depth to these characters with one of the earliest standout examples of this trend and re-examination coming from the cinderella sequels of all things yeah those movies no one watched cinderella is as basic as a story as you can get you have a girl who is treated like shit is a servant in her own home thanks to an abusive stepmother while her mean girl's stepsisters go out of the way to make her life hell then cindy finds her boring ass prince they get married and she gets to live happily ever after we don't actually see what happens to sisters or the mom but in the more recent retellings they usually get some sort of comeuppance which is always a massive downgrade from the original where god told some crows to peck out their eyes yeah those stories were grim but in the first film though these two sisters are nothing characters they're just mean said cinderella can be as miserable as possible before getting her happy ending and they don't need to be anything more than that that one note can't really be replayed in any of the sequels as they don't have the same power they used to have over her which is where shockingly character development comes in as in cinderella 2 we have anastasia the ugly sister who got progressively more pretty with every film because she's the good one now and yes they apparently have names i was shocked too anastasia falls in love with a poor baker you make some ends with cinderella who encourages her to follow her heart to marry this poor commoner rather than obey her mother and sister who have turned her into the family's new whipping girl running away to be happy and poor rather than trapped with her mother who really doesn't value her as a person which okay that's good that's an improvement it took this girl who was just nothing but mean and abusive in the original and gave her just a little bit more depth sure that she could change that she is questioning her life and you really get to see a lot of this of bad behavior just comes from her mother and sister then the third film happens where they do just ignore everything in the second film except the part where they make anastasia the more sympathetic sister who whilst all mean they keep that angle that she is the least worst of her family and that most of her worst behavior is a product of them she's a bully but she's also pressured into abusing cinderella we get this setup of an unhealthy family dynamic which goes a long way to explain why she would act the way she does and why we understand and forgive her for doing it as a third film it's a trip it asks the question what if the evil stepmom got the magical wand traveled back in time to make anastasia fit into the glass slipper the witch the prince and just more insanity from there but the relevant info is that we see anna come to truly regret being a part of her mother's schemes tricking amanda to loving her and for just how far her family will go to mrs treater just to be a little bit richer with it being her who decides to make things right by giving the wand back to cinderella who can then fix the timeline and anna is rewarded for this by getting her dough boy back while her mom and sister get hit by karma and are forced to work as servants in cinderella's house now i know that was a tangent none of you saw coming but it's worth it because this is really the blueprint for all of disney's repeats and especially for pacifica who after a full season of being just the generic rich bitch really came in swinging with her home life issues that made us understand who she is as a person as all works for adults for child characters having a fucked up family is truly a get out of jail free card before season 2 pacifica is just the worst vain braggy and incapable of letting anyone be better than her at anything and now they would finally dive into why she is like this explain where these traits come from as she does come from old money and her parents are the source of all of her worst traits teaching her to look down on everyone else for not being rich as them and this arrogant attitude is what you'd expect but then you start peeling back the layers and you start to get genuinely worried for pacifica as a person by how she's treated with cash to burn pacifica is given every chance to succeed she has the best tutors training and equipment money can buy but with these advantages comes the expectation of pacifica will be the best not second or third place she has to win oh and whatever happens just remember one thing you're a northwest don't lose her dad expects that w and anything less is considered a failure leaving pacifico with no room for error and she desperately tries to please her parents let's be real don't give a shit about her forced to live to an impossible standard it's only through her rivalry with the pines twins does she learn to do anything new the two earning her respect between fighting for their lives at golf despite the fact that they were cheating doesn't this seem like cheating pacifica's rich mabel she's cheating at life this paints a picture of becifika despite all the flexing she does really doesn't have any control over her own life then the shipping episode happens and holy f was it worse than you expected so the day of the big rich people party a ghost appears to have its revenge on the northwest they fucked over the ancestors big surprise forcing pacifica to go to dipper for help exercising it and it's really here that we see the full scope of just how afraid pacifica is of her parents who with just a ring of a bell are able to put her back in line she goes from defending herself and arguing just this quiet and helpless young girl who can do nothing but obey not able to control what she wears we really see that every part of her life is controlled by someone else but it's the bell that makes everything she goes through just feel horrifying for those who don't know this is a reference to the pavlov experiments a famous test about classical conditioning where dogs were given food and then a bell was wrong leading them to build an association with the bell to the point where even just the bell ringing would cause them to drool even when there was no food but the fact that they use this in the show proves just how badly the family treats her it's not just that they control her but it's the fact that they treat her no different than a dog in a way it's worse than just having them flat out showing her get hit with a belt and she'll have to wonder how did they get that association how are they able to make it so that she just immediately falls apart when she hears that bell dementingly becomes submissive like that and that mystery nightmare fuel just makes you assume the worst it's a definitive case of emotional abuse at the very least but this extra context makes you automatically sympathetic to pacifica's position and makes you understand why she can't disobey them she couldn't even get mud on her parents carpet while being chased by a ghost out to kill her and they only survived because of dumb luck that's how far her parents have her brainwashed that's terrifying up until this point had just been an antagonist never a truly terrible or threatening one just a bully so this episode goes above and beyond to make you understand and sympathize with her as her situation is horrifying and thankfully it ends with her overcoming that conditioning to do the right thing and save the day you have the cost of disobeying her parents to let the townsfolk in to break the curse pacifica recognizes how horrible her family was but for the longest time felt trapped and could only go along with it but when given the chance though and dipper's life was at risk she saved him and the day earning her spy on the phantom as one of its most popular characters and this would continue to be disney's winning formula of creating fan favorites as just to go through the list amy from outhouse start out again generic bully who we would learn more and more about and forgive as it starts pushing her together with loose but the worst of her behavior couldn't be explained away as just her being too competitive she spent years bullying the self-confidence out of her former best friend willow but did they explain it away by saying this was just a mandate from her rich parents with them not only forcing her to do that to widow but by forcing her to befriend a bunch of toxic influences resulting her getting so used to acting in a certain way that a lie became real it's terrible but you understand why she has a child would do this as kids are really shaped by their parents which is in essence why we are so forgiving of this trope as yes sure after a certain point your parents don't matter but when you're a kid they are kind of everything as a lot of these traits are encouraged by them well the worst ones that we have need to be reined in in amni's case they weren't haven't seen all of molly mcgee yet but this is definitely the angle that they're going for andrea suffering from neglectful paranitis we can pretty much expect that yes this will be another turn for the club but i do feel like of all these characters sasha is kind of the best because she really doesn't have that troubled home life to excuse herself the best we can tell she might come from divorced parents but without this excuse the story comes down way harder on her for her own behavior and what she does meaning she has to actually earn forgiveness recognizing how her control issues cost her her friends while also recognizing she may have never been a good one it makes for a better overall story though the way the series escalates in later half yeah it makes that turn for sash just a little bit murky as it feels like everyone that had to forgive sasha as they had just bigger problems to deal with but still very satisfying and sasha was almost immediately the fan favorite the real question becomes why are they so popular because again yeah they do the turn they go from bully to hero why is that just everyone loves it why is this just some people's obsession why does trauma and switching sides get everyone's approval every time for myself personally as a living work in progress sign i love watching other people be a complete dumpster fire i love characters who are unapologetically themselves especially when they are garbage if i wanted to watch a show about a moral good boy who never had to make a hard decision i'd play animal crossing watching people struggle to overcome themselves it's just the character development that i always appreciate and love that catharsis in seeing someone spend all their time struggling before making that right decision and getting to a better place even when poorly written hits it's the same idea behind the defrosting ice queen trope or the male version your dad you just know that there is a lot of love there there's a lot of good and you know they want to show it but it's that slow build of waiting for them to finally open up that hits you in the feels every time all the pain and tension finally paying off with the journey they're allowing for these characters to get way more development than the rest of the cast ah sure dipper and mabel are great characters they only have to be their enjoyable selves pacifica on the other hand has to change and has to understand what she's doing wrong to become a better person that's not something you can do at the drop of a hat it has to be built up to extra attention has to be given to how characters think so that we can understand why they want to change and just as importantly why they haven't already it's this added complexity that often send the most interesting person in the entire show which just makes you invested and that strong characterization usually keeps them that way even when they switch teams this is the zuko effect now for those who don't follow me on twitter i actually hate bringing up zuko's redemption arc because i am just sick to death of people using it as the baseline for everything coming in close to three seasons not everyone has that time to milk the shit out of it like he did but if he has done anything it was to show just how popular a redemption story can be and inspired other people to do their own takes gravity falls was a start for a whole lot of trends at disney but pacifica was the key to where we started seeing this trend specifically of characters getting redeemed and switching sides really just become not just a trope you'd see every once in a while but just a feature so you expect and are waiting for it's a great archetype people love to see it so it makes sense why they keep doing it and with each version just having enough variation to keep it from feeling like a retread the character is always fun to begin with as just being villains but the angst of watching them change really makes it worthwhile but for as short as pacifica's arc was it is shockingly effective and gives hope to everyone that maybe just maybe you can come back from being a jackass also for everyone watching who actually want an in-depth pacific dip video here's the lighting round i need your help you're the worst yes it's cute watching characters that hate each other hook up yes tipper does tear down pacifica but immediately starts building her up when she's at her lowest moment and he does this as her number one hater watching her make him look fancy is cute and tying the tie was just a right amount no i'm fixing you energy the betrayal then sacrifice pacifica pulled is gonna get most people in a mood just like how dipper was able to help her go from fearing death to stomping on carpets in the best sign of character growth both of them needed as not only is this pacific northwest doing better but dipper is turning off his brain and ignoring armageddon just to hang out with her yes i do know about journal 3 where he crossed out calling her cute and just like the star wars eu if it's not in the main series it didn't happen as it's liable to change anytime because there's no consequences for it overall it's a fun ship i kind of just wish we got more of it but honestly the episode made me more invested in pacifica as a character than them as a couple i see a potential ultimately i chalk up a lot of this energy behind them as thank god he moved on energy then this one episode really sold them so it's basically flame princess all over again check out private internet access vpn this is sarcastic course with strep and think catcher i can finally shut up like share and subscribe i have a twitter and instagram you can follow as well also youtube lets you give tips now so use that or my kofi because bread

Channel: Sarcastic Chorus

Views: 379,884

Keywords: gravityfalls, pacifica

Id: XSNhC5QX8Sw

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022